viva la comida révelucion!

Jeffrey D. Sachs, the head of Columbia University's Earth Institute said recently that if every person in the developed world gave $10, we could double Africa's production of food. Before I came to Germany, I was so excited by the idea of a Global Community. The idea that every person on earth has the ability to communicate with, love, effect, share ideas and music and art with. Now Global seems like a scary word. 100,000 dead in Myanmar and the Global Community steps forward to help. Their government doesn't seem to care to much. Thousands of people starving in third world nations and people are shocked that in America we can only buy 4 100kg bags of rice per visit to Sam's Club. The Western World has brought all of these problems on themselves (ourselves) by years and years of "Global" meaning the rest of the world works for $5 a day so that we can enjoy our extravagant lifestyle and eat Kiwi year-round and ship in every piece of clothing we own from 1,000's of miles away. Global seemed promising. Earth, Humanity as one Democratic conglomerate of humanity. Finally including the "third world" into that realm of, well, the rest of the world. (Are there second-world countries?) However, America being part of this "Global Community" we are now being affected by our own consumption rates. The first of many headlines being that rice would be limited in wholesale chains like Sam's and CostCo. Now we have to start worrying about how far our food has to travel. Is it really worth it to have a Kiwi in February when it has to be sprayed with chemical preservatives and shipped half-way around the world? Do we really need shoes made in Thailand? Aren't we skilled enough to mass-produce our own shoes? Will it ever become cheaper to pay someone normal American minimum wage to make a pair of Nike's in Michigan rather than pay some one from Thailand $1 a day and pay $60,000 dollars to ship the shoes to the states where they will then be put into trucks and driven across the country costing even more in gas prices. I guess I never considered the cost of being global. The effect of using fossil fuels to fuel our global markets. When will it all come crashing down? When will American farmers start producing for Americans and (god forbid!) we'll have to start eating fruits and vegetables only when they're in season. And we'll have to buy fruits from Farmer's Markets instead of Wal-Mart. Imagine a world where everyone contributes only to their respective countries' own economy and no one relies on anyone else for energy, food or resources and we can start seeing countries in terms of culture and humanity rather than how much fertile land we can buy from them or how little we can pay their factory workers. Is this idealistic? Maybe I am still excited by Globalization. I mean, once gas becomes unaffordable this whole existence that's been spiraling out of control since the first mass-produced Ford Model A rolled off the assembly line. This is the boiling point. This is the beginning of the end. Once people start getting hungry enough, the revolution begins. But for now, I'm getting pretty hungry...